Dead Boys Club
by VladimirsAngel
Summary: Did you ever have an unusual hobby? Angel does...she collects dead guys. Please R & R if you read.


**Dead Boys Club**

_…dedicated to my husband, who always said that with the amount of them I had hanging around my head making pests of themselves, I should start a support group. I originally thought of this as a one-shot, but now I'm not so sure. What do you think?_

_Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters in this story except Angel, my ever-troubled narrator._

What is it with me and rescuing the dead?

Possibly it's some sort of fetish: although all in all it would have been easier to have taken up bondage or S & M. At least with those you can buy all the equipment you need from little shops in Soho and there are parties you can go to in order to meet other like-minded people.

I guess it's a little like bondage, though, in the way that I carefully don't talk about it. No-one _really_ talks about their hobbies or their private lives. Like me, you may wear a nice non-descript grey business suit to work, and spend all day totting up mindless facts and figures on a computer screen: but it would never in a million years occur to you to turn to the drone in the next cubicle and start a discourse on the many marvels rubber can offer the discerning modern gimp. Now I'm not personally into rubber, but equally, it never occurs to me to discuss with anyone the fact that, as of last week, I now have _two_ dead people staying in my flat.

Raziel has been with me for just over two years. I could have coped: could have dismissed the fact that I'd suddenly acquired a housemate who was deader than a whole crate of doornails and fictional into the bargain as a rare, nay freak occurance, if it hadn't been for the distressing fact that I've just acquired _another _dead guy.

I mean, that goes beyond co-incidence or a passing interest: that practically makes it a hobby. I can see it now, as I construct my latest resume. "Hobbies and Interests: going to the movies, playing squash, collecting dead guys." Any time now someone in my family is going to grass me up, and then it'll be like I was nine all over again, when someone let slip to my uncles that I liked unicorns. It was fatal. By the time I was twelve, I had sixteen unicorns, and I hated every last ceramic sugar-pink tail and fuzzy spiral horn. So I suppose it's understandable that I have had three nightmares in the last week that involve coming down to my parent's living room on Christmas morning and finding festively-wrapped dead guys sitting bemusedly under the tree. No. No-one's going to find out. Two is enough. I can stop now. Two is plenty.

I can give them up any time I like.

And besides, Raziel keeps giving me his unimpressed face when I pass him in the kitchen, as if I've caused his ego some terrible over-reaching harm. This is exactly the reason I don't go to animal sanctuaries. As I told him at the time, I rescued Raziel because at one crucial moment in the game he turned on the screen and gave me a look that was the wraith equivalent of puppy-dog-eyes. "Take me home. Don't let the bad men hurt me anymore. I can be a happy doggie again."

He doesn't like this analogy, but it doesn't seem to stop him pulling the same look on me when we run out of waffles.

He doesn't like the new dead guy, either. Odd. I thought they would have…you know...bonded, considering that fate dealt them both a really sucky hand. But no. The first day I had to go to work and leave them alone together, I returned to a deeply uncomfortable silence and a huge pile of peanut shells littering my coffee table. Plus, Raz stopped doing the washing up after that day. I think he's trying to make a point. What is it coming to, really, when you're centuries old, dead, and yet you still feel you have to make a point by creating an ever-growing mound of scummy coffee-mugs in the washing-up bowl?

I told him it was childish. He agreed with me. This got us nowhere and made the stupid old woman next door, who is selectively deaf (as in, she has to have the TV turned up so loud that she's got a whole island of lost pygmies hooked on _EastEnders_, but if you start having a slanging match with a dead guy at half-eight in the evening, she complains to the landlord) bang on the wall.

This may explain why I'm a little tense at work. I keep worrying that when I get home the mould from the cups will have advanced to the industrial age and intelligent spores will be creating Stephenson's Rocket in the tumble-dryer. Other people might be more worried about the hygiene possibilities of having dead guys sharing their bathroom, but since Raz assured me long ago that anything likely to fall off him in water has _certainly_ already fallen off and the new guy is so obsessive about personal grooming that he takes more showers than I do, I figure I'm pretty safe. I just have to keep an eye on those cups.

I wonder if you can put down "not wanting to get caught in the crossfire" as a legitimate reason for working overtime? And, of course, it may be literal crossfire now. My co-workers are already looking at me funny because I came back from town yesterday lunchtime with no less than six bottles of top-quality hair conditioner in my handbag and an extra-large jar of peanut butter. Peace offerings, you see?

Peanut butter's the only thing he seems to want to eat. I thought Raz was mellowing towards him on Sunday, because he made us all pancakes. But seeing as the pancakes got sneered at and practically thrown back in his face, I don't think the gesture was appreciated.

Looking up at the work clock now, and it's almost time to start heading home. I just know I'm going to spend my whole twenty-minute train journey thinking about plates. Raz was never good with plates anyway – his claws get all slippery with washing-up liquid, and then he drops them – but I think we may actually degenerate into throwing crockery tonight unless I can get the new guy to loosen up. I feel like saying to him, "Hey, come on – you're dead. Yeah, it's a pain. Get over it." Except that I wouldn't dare. He has a chip on his shoulder so big he practically walks with a limp to compensate for it. You know, not that I like the plates I've got, because they're not even a set, they're just cobbled together from stuff I ended up with at university, but it's the principle of the thing that bothers me.

Raziel is in the kitchen when I turn my key in the lock and step indoors. I can hear the plates clinking in the sink. Nice move, Raz. You've got all the ammunition.

The other one is sitting on the couch, watching _Animal __Hospital_. Even though I can only see the back of his blond head, I can already feel the barely leashed fury radiating off him in waves. Don't you just hate people who can do this? It's the same sense of helpless frustrated anger inspired by the person who, when a meeting chairman calls for "Any other business?" just prior to lunch being served, will be out of his seat and waving a file folder about an inch thick, complete with annotations and diagrams.

It must be bad for my karma, having him here. I swear, five minutes in this atmosphere and Gandhi would be squaring up to punch Mother Teresa in the nose.

I sit down on the sofa next to him with a sigh and turn off my mobile phone. His dark, bewildered gaze turns to me, and I pretend to be suddenly very interested in the sad story of a neglected hamster on the TV. In the kitchen, Raziel drops a plate, and I sigh again.

He stares at me for almost a full minute, before I sense rather than see his lip curl in disgust.

"I despise you," he mutters.

I reach out and give his long pale fingers a comforting squeeze. He jumps.

"I know, Haldir, hon. I know."


End file.
